Media jihad: why Isis's leaders bow to its propagandists

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A recent, wearyingly grim clip from Islamic State shows six armed children sweeping a castle in search of bound hostages. One by one, they enter the ruin, their movement tracked by multiple cameras. When, at last, each boy finds a target, cringing in the shadows, he lines up a shot and, following a theatrical pause, squeezes the trigger. The footage invites many questions. Who are these children? Who are the men they kill? What perverted doctrine could ever defend such cruelty? How large was the production team?

Was there, for example, a casting director, who held auditions in search of the most photogenic boys? Who picked out the location, the ruined Qalaat al-Rahba castle on the outskirts of the Syrian city of Mayadin? Someone must have sourced the “props” and “costumes” (handguns, balaclavas), and there were at least two camera crews on foot, as evidenced by the film’s dramatic, staccato cuts. Were there gaffers and grips, too? Did someone provide catering? During the edit, a post-production team added overlays of the hostages speaking to camera, in the style of self-commentating contestants on a reality TV show. This was, in other words, a major shoot.

The footage appals not only for its depiction of children as the perpetrators of deadly violence, but also for the over-the-shoulder intimacy of their actions. It shocks in another way, too, one that its creators perhaps did not anticipate. While the violence is unique to Isis and other death cults, the style is of western invention. The look of the thing is all ours. This film, like many of those released by the terrorist group in the past 18 months, employs the aesthetic of contemporary Hollywood films, video games and TV shows, with their tracks and zooms, their whizzing motion graphics, their slow-mo gunfire and rhythmic edits. It is terror spoken in the language of western pop culture. It is both alien and harrowingly familiar.

A trailer for America’s Army, the video game made by the US army and used as a recruitment tool

The Sun newspaper described the footage as Hunger Games-esque, referring to the series of novels and films in which young people hunt one another in front of a live audience. The New Yorker described an earlier Isis-made video – which shows an assault rifle being fired from the window of a car at the driver of another passing vehicle – as like a scene lifted from the video game Call of Duty. The writer could almost imagine, he wrote, button prompts appearing on screen, inviting him to advance the action. This is the year in which Tangerine, an American film shot entirely on iPhone 5S smartphones, was talked of as an Oscar contender. While Hollywood begins to explore the aesthetic of our newly democratised film equipment, terrorist snuff has moved in the opposite direction, toward the high-production sheen of the blockbuster.

These videos are “propaganda tools”, as one Downing Street spokesperson put it following the recent release of another 10-minute Isis-made film that shows the execution, led by a man with a British accent, of five captives wearing orange jumpsuits. Notably, Isis described this video as a trailer for a more substantial film, borrowing cinema’s marketing language on top of its visual vocabulary. They aim to inspire in young men not religious fervour, but rather a lust for power and control – see the pornographic shots of rocket launchers and assault rifles, arms apparently awaiting a bearer. They aim to lead young men, perhaps those with ancestral links to the region, to think, as DH Lawrence put it, not with the mind but “with the blood”. They offer a chance to make the playful violence of action movies, sports and video games earnest. And it works: in June 2014, one Isis fighter told the BBC that his new life was “better than that game Call of Duty”.

For propaganda of shock to be effective, it must continue to raise the stakes: if the violence becomes too routine, it risks losing its audience. Hollywood, too, has been here. In cinema’s earliest decades, screen violence was tame and peril-free, comprised of “ox-stunning fisticuffs”, as Vladimir Nabokov described it. That began to change in the mid-1960s, when the Hays Code, which provided directors with moral guidance on what they were permitted to depict on screen, loosened. Films such as Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde and Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch dispensed with the Homeric invulnerability of cinema’s formative heroes. They returned to the gore of Shakespeare’s theatres, where goats’ blood swilled across the stage. On screen, bones began to rip with the dread sound of a torn lettuce. Nuggets of shot-gunned brain snailed down the walls. Directors who wanted to shock their audience had to escalate. Kill counts rose and, with desensitisation, age-ratings fell. Yesterday’s adults-only became tomorrow’s parental guidance. It is a similar trajectory that Isis now follows as it hunts for fresh ways to appal, lest it become yesterday’s news.

A still from Transformers: Dark of the Moon, which was made with the help of the US military under a deal brokered by the Pentagon’s entertainment liaison office. Photograph: Everett/Rex

“These videos are key,” explains Roger Stahl, associate professor of communication studies at the University of Georgia. “They are necessary in Isis’s effort to paint itself as a continual target of the west’s enmity. The group has learned that, in order to cut through the clutter and noise of the infosphere, it must continually up the ante.” Indeed, Isis’s current media strategy builds upon the work of al-Qaida and the Taliban, organisations that learned the news value of beheading videos and the destruction of treasured artefacts. Media is increasingly fuelled by outrage, which, online at least, has proven a more powerful click-motivator than even the alluring promise of the cat gif. Isis, like Donald Trump, Katie Hopkins and every other headline-grasping pariah today, knows only too well the value of others’ indignation.

The escalation in production values is about something else, however. Stahl believes that Isis has attracted production talent – those camera operators, location scouts and editors. “It is apparent with each release that they are discovering the utility of theatricising events,” he says. “This naturally means marshalling advanced film techniques and narrative methods pioneered in cinema. It seems to me that the trend is toward what they call in Hollywood ‘high concept’ – an immediately relatable storyline that, not incidentally, translates well into a headline.” The audience for these videos is split, then, between those who come to feel outraged, and those who come to feel inspired.

For Dr Kyle Grayson, senior lecturer in international politics at Newcastle University, there are numerous reasons why production values increasingly matter to Isis. “For one, the message becomes easier to deliver, because audiences are not having to decipher the means through which it is being delivered; the genre and its conventions are familiar,” he explains. “Moreover, in a crowded mediascape, Isis has to hold the attention of its desired audiences.” Poor production values, in other words, don’t cut it any more. Worse still, they could invite scorn and ridicule – arguably the most powerful weapon that can be used against a bully or villain as it attacks the myth and the legacy. “This is about projecting an image to a global audience about how strong and dangerous Isis is as an organisation, at a time when they have been experiencing significant setbacks on the ground,” says Grayson. “You could argue that what we are seeing is, in fact, a politics of bluff.”

Isis is not the only militarised outfit to co-opt entertainment for recruitment. America’s Army is a freely available PC game, released on Independence Day in 2002, that doubles as a military enlistment tool. The game, in which you attend a virtual bootcamp before collaborating with other players on military operations, cost $7.5m to produce and, by December 2003, had more than 1.3 million registered players. Within three years, that figure had risen to 7.5 million, aided by the game’s regular appearances in local shopping malls, where young people were invited to play by recruiters who would then stand alongside them, talking about what life in the armed forces can be like. In 2005, 40% of new enlistees to the US armed forces claimed to have played the game.

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Similarly, the US military has a long and involved relationship with Hollywood, routinely offering its planes and vehicles to be used as props in movies in exchange for script sign-off. Francis Ford Coppola famously turned down such a deal when making Apocalypse Now. Michael Bay embraced a similar agreement for Transformers. Such deals are brokered by the Pentagon’s entertainment liaison office, a unit entirely dedicated to such work. It is headed by Phil Strub, who is credited in more than 50 films. “Producers and directors often write their scripts so that Strub’s office will look upon them more favourably from the beginning,” explains Stahl, whose 2010 book, Militainment Inc, explores the links between war and popular culture. “A deal is struck in the backroom whereby the film-maker gets the most bang for the investment buck, and the Pentagon’s entertainment liaison office gets to promote the military, either through recruiting or advancing certain historical narratives.”

This kind of relationship dates back to the first world war, but was institutionalised after 1945, serving to tilt the representation of war in the direction dictated by Pentagon public relations. Today, each of the four branches of the US military, as well as the CIA, FBI and the Department of Homeland Security, have similar offices that do business with the entertainment industries.

There are, of course, clear differences between Isis’s use of high-production snuff footage and the Pentagon’s strategy when it deploys entertainment for propaganda purposes. For one, America’s Army does not glorify violence (although, certainly, some of the films the Pentagon has supported do); nor does it enact it for real.

A segment from the 2007 video game Call of Duty: Modern Warfare titled Death from Above, which was styled after real footage from US gunships

Such differences are harder to dismiss when the Pentagon moves from the realm of fiction to reality. During the Afghanistan and Iraq invasions, for example, grainy film shot from an AC-130 Spectre gunship, a plane armed with a large-calibre machine-gun and mounted cannon, periodically appeared on the internet. The AC-130, reportedly nicknamed “Azrael” by pilots, after the angel of death in the Qur’an, can engage ground targets from vast distances. The videos, many of which are on YouTube, show infrared footage of bodies running in fear, before dissipating in the tremor of a ghostly explosion. This style of violence was later used as a template for a chapter titled Death from Above, in 2007’s Call of Duty: Modern Warfare. (The game’s publisher, Activision, refused to comment for this article on whether it has ever received financial support from the US military.)

Whether or not the Pentagon was behind the public release of this footage – the depiction of combatant deaths is a legal grey area in international humanitarian law – the AC-130 videos fit within its strategy to deliver a vision of a clean, surgical war scrubbed of suffering or death. “The closest we get in official releases is a vague sense that some anonymous ‘bad guys’ might be down there in the form of infrared images,” says Stahl. “The snuff-propaganda videos released by Isis, in contrast, are designed to maximise the sense of intimacy and horror.”

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These different media approaches are two sides of the same coin in asymmetrical warfare. Both offer footage of human deaths. And yet one seems far more palatable or, at least, permissible than the other. “Many western cultures have a predisposition to viewing acts of violence committed through particular forms of advanced technology,” says Grayson. “They are seen as being more precise, humane and therefore civilised, particularly when applied against ‘bad people’.” Beheadings, by contrast, are seen as an act of violence that has become a marker for savagery and barbarism. “There is another layer of politics operating here regarding what audiences perceive as legitimate targets for violence, legitimate commissioners of violence, and the legitimacy of specific methods.”

Today, anyone engaging in military activity requires a persuasive media strategy. Isis’s cinematic flair is not designed merely to shock. It is also designed to portray the group as powerful, competent and, most importantly, able to speak to a global audience directly, unimpeded and in a familiar language – be it accented English, or an action flick. Likewise, the US military uses film to shore up support for its actions. In both instances, the outcomes can be devastating. “In the case of the Iraq invasion, a powerful media strategy helped to destroy a nation of 25 million, killing up to 1.2 million civilians by some estimates, and creating millions of refugees,” says Stahl. “In the case of Isis, the media strategy has helped to kill about 10,000 people according to human rights agencies. Both constitute atrocities on one scale or another.”